Why do newer OS's seem to use less RAM?

N

netsider

Limp Gawd
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Oct 12, 2004
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I know this probably isn't a universal "rule of thumb" (that newer OS's use less memory), but why does it seem true sometimes? Is it because of how they run programs, or because they're less "bloated" and more "polished"? Windows 8 uses less memory than Windows 7 (which is what I'm basing this one on), and it seems like this has been the case a lot in the past too.

Why is this? Just curious...
 
XP used a whole lot less, like half of what Windows 7 uses. Windows 8, maybe its just a little more efficient with the way it handles RAM. Kinda like how todays engines make more power and get better gas mileage than older engines. Technology and evolution.
 
I don't see this as the case at all. XP pre SP's without anything installed was like 96MB of ram. Vista and 7 32 bit could idle down to around 500-600 MB. Windows 8 by default has more services running than 7 and I don't remember it idling with less memory than 7, so I'm not sure where you are getting that from.

I think the biggest factor is how many start up / notification area stuff you have running. All said and done, 8.1 did not use less memory on my system than 7 did when fully loaded.

The one benefit of newer OS's is that 8 has more drivers by default. So on Windows 7 I had to install my USB 3.0 drivers which ran as a service and took up memory. On 8 the drivers were included and did not use a service. There is technically a savings, even if it's only like 2 or 3 MB.
 
bigdogchris said:
I don't see this as the case at all. XP pre SP's without anything installed was like 96MB of ram.
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Yeah, I remember pre-Service Packs, XP machines were quite functional with 256MB of RAM. After SP3, anything less than 1.5Gigs was painful. To be fair though, general software bloat over the years probably had a lot to do with it too.
 
In Windows 8's case, it's simple tuning. They've done a few things like making application prefetch a bit less aggressive, pooling memory, sucking out a lot from the Explorer process and so forth.
 
I know this probably isn't a universal "rule of thumb" (that newer OS's use less memory), but why does it seem true sometimes?
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I do not recall this ever being true. Not with linux and absolutely not with any version of Microsoft windows. And being in the IT field for over 2 decades I have done thousands of OS installs. When you install Microsoft operating systems you get the marketing BS that the new OS will be faster and more efficient. It never ever is. The only reason it appears to be more efficient is when you install it you have no other software installed.
 
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drescherjm said:
I do not recall this ever being true. Not with linux and absolutely not with any version of Microsoft windows. And being in the IT field for over 2 decades I have done thousands of OS installs. When you install Microsoft operating systems you get the marketing BS that the new OS will be faster and more efficient. It never ever is. The only reason it appears to be more efficient is when you install it you have no other software installed.
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This is nonsense. Windows 7 was easily much faster and responsive than Vista, and so is Win 8. You do know years of engineering go into these releases, it isn't just smoke and mirrors and marketing. MS doesn't do the Apple '500 million new features' fluff, you have data to backup claims (like faster boot) and its seen by users.
 
Windows 7 was easily much faster and responsive than Vista, and so is Win 8.
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Only if you replace the hardware. Otherwise I say your claim is nonsense.
 
MrCrispy said:
This is nonsense. Windows 7 was easily much faster and responsive than Vista, and so is Win 8.
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Vista ran like shit at launch because companies were shipping it on XP grade hardware (512MB ram, etc). Hell, before 7 came out I ran Vista with a dual core CPU, 4GB of ram and a WD Black HDD and wouldn't of gone back to XP for any reason. It was awesome.
 
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Vista was fine, but as bigdogchris said, it was sold on crap hardware by OEM's and no one understood SuperFetch and cried bloody foul that the OS was using all you're memory!!!!! OH NOESSSSSS

I find Windows 8 is faster at boot than windows 7 on a clean install, it does have a snappier feel, but i wouldnt say i could time it at all.

Windows 7 was a fine tuned Vista as Windows 8 is a fine tuned win 7 (not counting metro)
 
MrCrispy said:
This is nonsense. Windows 7 was easily much faster and responsive than Vista, and so is Win 8. You do know years of engineering go into these releases, it isn't just smoke and mirrors and marketing. MS doesn't do the Apple '500 million new features' fluff, you have data to backup claims (like faster boot) and its seen by users.
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Vista stock and definitely with the SP's was perfectly fine if you had the hardware to run it, especially RAM. I ran it for 3 years on a high-end 2006 laptop with dual cores and 2GB of RAM. They tweaked a few things to make Aero have less of an impact in Windows 7, but it still uses a colossal amount of RAM, and I love it.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Vista was fine, but as bigdogchris said, it was sold on crap hardware by OEM's and no one understood SuperFetch and cried bloody foul that the OS was using all you're memory!!!!! OH NOESSSSSS
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I wish I had kept track the number of times I heard people complain about "Vista eating all my memory" because of the "free" counter showing zero...
 
I know, drove me nuts. I had several old Dell P4's with 1Gig of memory running Vista / Office and used for basic office usage with out any problems.

2Gig was better, but they ran, often around 1Gig of memory usage but they were usable.
 
7 is more efficient than Vista because of some critical engineering fixes, e.g. removing global lock, combining memory pool used for Aero etc. I wish I could find the link to the B7 blog entry which talked in detail about all this. I'm not sure why this is being contested.
 
8.0 is more efficient than 7 with memory. 8.1 is actually even more efficient than 8.0. I noticed 2GB of ram goes further with 8.1 than 8.0. Could tell from experience. 7 hogged a lot of memory and didn't really let it go much. Vista was the worst i think. XP was pretty efficient.
 
OS uses less, programs use so much more. I never thought web browsing could use as much memory as it does nowadays - sometimes.
 
MrCrispy said:
This is nonsense. Windows 7 was easily much faster and responsive than Vista, and so is Win 8. You do know years of engineering go into these releases, it isn't just smoke and mirrors and marketing. MS doesn't do the Apple '500 million new features' fluff, you have data to backup claims (like faster boot) and its seen by users.
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That's because when Vista came out, people were trying to run it on single core 512MB machines, whereas now people are running 7/8 on Quads with 8GB+ ram. Vista runs nicely on a semi modern machine.

Regardless, this thread is wrong on its assumption in the first place. The OS's are using much more ram. Windows 95 / 98 use tiny amounts and can run fine on 16 / 32 MB of ram. Windows XP needs 128MB as a minimum but starts to run nicely with 512MB. Vista/7/8 basically need 2GB minimum.
 
HeavensCloud said:
OS uses less, programs use so much more. I never thought web browsing could use as much memory as it does nowadays - sometimes.
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It wasn't always like this, there was a huge jump at one point. A big part of it is when Chrome or IE started making each tab its own individual process instead of lumping all the tabs under the same single process. It makes for a much more stable experience, since if one tab stops responding, only that tab needs to be killed and restarted instead of bringing the entire browser down with it, but it also means alot more memory usage
 
On the lower end you could say newer OSes are gaining efficiency (maybe 1 or 2GB and less) At the high end (4GB or more) they all seem to be the same.
 
bigdogchris said:
On the lower end you could say newer OSes are gaining efficiency (maybe 1 or 2GB and less) At the high end (4GB or more) they all seem to be the same.
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So this is an interesting discussion, but I have to ask: With a modern or even a "semi-modern" system, considering the price of DDR3 RAM these days, is RAM such an issue. Me, I found a real performance boost in both my laptop and desktop systems by using SSDs for my OS/Programs and active Data partitions. HDDs are now relegated to bulk storage for media, photos, music, etc.
 
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I have windows 7 VMS running on ~100 mb ram usage.
 
You have a couple factors that have all sort of come together.

Because of the mobile movement. Basically no one gives a shit about top end performance anymore so everything is about reducing footprints, saving battery life and energy. In addition the main OS, windows is trying to bridge very mobile devices like phones and tablets with desktops. Doing this means they have to make things work on amounts of RAM that are available. Same with memory, because of nand in mobile 8GB storeage is actually something people will have to deal with again.



Also SSDs definitely have made it so that precaching as much as possible in RAM is not that needed anymore. The down side is hard drives suck more.

Third MS is really the driving force behind trends. People either want to beat MS to a punch or catch up to them. And MS really get hit hard by Vista which was more aggressive in precaching and RAM usage. As MS often does their reaction was to go heavy in the opposite direction. Which means they went crazy on reducing RAM usage.

It is kind of sad but now days a number of things such as total system RAM, and storage as well as CPU power have just stagnated waiting for the mobile hardware to catch up.
 
I dunno.. On WinXP my system had 4GB of RAM and the OS generally used 1.5GB or so.. My new system running Windows 7 with 16GB of RAM boots up and uses around 3GB.
 
PornoSatan said:
Windows 95 / 98 use tiny amounts and can run fine on 16 / 32 MB of ram. .
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Right. But the problem was, microsoft advertised to everyone that W95 would run just fine on ONLY 4 MB of ram, and in those days, that was the most any current machines had, having come from win 3.11. If you installed win95 on a machine with that 4 MB of ram, it would churn the swap file continuously, slowing the machine to a crawl. With each new version of windows, microsoft has always advertised it's operating system's requirements like this, in order to sell them. Then once you install it, your computer runs so slow that you think it's dead, or locks up completely. Same thing happened when people moved from win 98 to xp; not enough memory. Same from xp to vista. Towards the end of xp's being installed on new machines, if you wanted it quick, you needed 4GB of ram. Today if you use win7, and only have 4GB ram and have a few programs running while browsing the web with multple tabs open, your machine will slow down. With each move all along, with the ancient remnants of old operating systems and software, the hard drive swap file always came into play, if you minimized a program the os would automatically write it onto disk, churning the hard drive for no particular reason even when you had plenty of ram free. Even today, windows uses a swap file even if you have many gb of ram free. Fortunately, if you put it onto a ssd, there's little lag anymore. But it goes to show how long ancient code affects new computers.
 
wonderfield said:
In Windows 8's case, it's simple tuning. They've done a few things like making application prefetch a bit less aggressive, pooling memory, sucking out a lot from the Explorer process and so forth.
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They also made one major change when going from 7 to 8: Full memory de-duplication.

Basically, if the same thing gets loaded into memory more than once, Windows 8 recognizes this and dumps the duplicate copy out of RAM (replacing it with a pointer towards the already-loaded data).

So lets say you fire up Google Chrome and open a large number of tabs. Every tab spawns a new process, and all of those processes have some duplicate information loaded into RAM. This browser session will take up less memory on Windows 8 than the same browser session on Windows 7.
 
Windows 95 uses less RAM than Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows XP
 
MrCrispy said:
This is nonsense. Windows 7 was easily much faster and responsive than Vista, and so is Win 8. You do know years of engineering go into these releases, it isn't just smoke and mirrors and marketing. MS doesn't do the Apple '500 million new features' fluff, you have data to backup claims (like faster boot) and its seen by users.
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This is the funniest sh!t I have read a while. Thank you.
 
Cerulean said:
Windows 95 uses less RAM than Windows 7, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows XP
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It's also doing quite a lot less at idle. There's no 3D compositing, bitmap-skinned GUIs, wallpaper slideshows, application prefetch, background defragmentation, on-the-fly disk encryption, ASLR or malware prevention, among others. 95 also shipped without a firewall, and every pointer in 64-bit versions of Windows is twice as large (about which there's nothing Microsoft can do). There's certainly some bloat in current versions of Windows — they started buttfucking the OS with a lot of truly extraneous stuff in the Me/XP era — but Microsoft's actually done a fairly good job of leaning things out recently.

I think it's pretty obvious, though, that the OP was talking about the post-Vista transition in terms of memory usage, not going back through every OS ever released.
 
Unknown-One said:
They also made one major change when going from 7 to 8: Full memory de-duplication.

Basically, if the same thing gets loaded into memory more than once, Windows 8 recognizes this and dumps the duplicate copy out of RAM (replacing it with a pointer towards the already-loaded data).

So lets say you fire up Google Chrome and open a large number of tabs. Every tab spawns a new process, and all of those processes have some duplicate information loaded into RAM. This browser session will take up less memory on Windows 8 than the same browser session on Windows 7.
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Got a link for that? I have plenty of very similar tabs open and ram usage still goes up.
 
game14 said:
newer OS use less RAM ??? when did that happen ??? :confused:
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There is actually some market factors causing developers to "lean" out their OSes somewhat semi recently due to the growth of devices with lower hardware specifications.

Both MS and Google for example have recently made changes to cater to these markets. It isn't just coding optimizations either but design as well. For example look at the current trend now in UI design, simpler with less flash.
 
On my new yoga 2 pro I sit at 3.1-3.3gb of 8gb while running a few basic apps. Now I think the cpu usage has dropped with new OS's (sitting at 8-10%) but not ram.
 
Windows 7 was tuned to make it easier for people to upgrade from XP and to run on netbooks. Microsoft knew that you couldn't run Vista on them and also knew customers were begging for an upgrade path.

Really though, other than really old hardware, it's much to talk about considering it is essentially impossible to buy a computer with less than 2 GB and 4 GB almost a defacto standard for anything other than tablets.

As far as how much memory is active, the choice is to keep things in memory in case you need them or flush it all. Unless there is memory pressure, there is no reason keep the available free memory high. The only way to measure how much memory is required is to keep lowering the RAM until the system doesn't work. Just watching free memory go up doesn't say the OS has an issue. It could be simply being smart.
 
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